THOMAS JEFFERSON

Notes on the State of Virginia

QUERY XIX

The present state of manufactures, commerce, interior and exterior trade?

WE NEVER had an interior trade of any importance. Our exterior commerce has
suffered very much from the beginning of the present contest. During this
time we have manufactured within our families the most necessary articles
of cloathing. Those of cotton will bear some comparison with the same kinds
of manufacture in Europe; but those of wool, flax and hemp are very coarse,
unsightly, and unpleasant: and such is our attachment to agriculture, and
such our preference for foreign manufactures, that be it wise or unwise,
our people will certainly return as soon as they can, to the raising [of]
raw materials, and exchanging them for finer manufactures than they are
able to execute themselves.

The political economists of Europe have established it as a principle
that every State should endeavour to manufacture for itself; and this
principle, like many others, we transfer to America, without calculating
the difference of circumstance which should often produce a difference of
result. In Europe the lands are either cultivated, or locked up against the
cultivator. Manufacture must therefore be resorted to of necessity not of
choice, to support the surplus of their people. But we have an immensity of
land courting the industry of the husbandman. Is it best then that all our
citizens should be employed in its improvement, or that one half should be
called off from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft arts for the
other? Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever
he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for
substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive
that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.
Corruption of morals in the mass of
cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has
furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not
looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does
the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on
casualties and caprice of customers. Dependance begets
subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and
prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the
natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes
perhaps been retarded by accidental circumstances: but,
generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the
other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its
husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy
parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its
degree of corruption. While we have land to labour then, let us
never wish to see our citizens occupied at a workbench, or
twirling a distaff . Carpenters, masons, smiths, are wanting in
husbandry: but, for the general operations of manufacture, let
our workshops remain in Europe. It is better to carry
provisions and materials to workmen there, than bring them to
the provisions and materials, and with them their manners and
principles. The loss by the transportation of commodities
across the Atlantic will be made up in happiness and permanence
of government. The mobs of great cities add just so much to the
support of pure government, as sores do to the strenth of the
human body. It is the manners, and spirit of a people which
preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a
canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and
constitution.